Subject: Questions about the new IETF mail archive

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 18 Jun 2015 19:14:03 -0000

It's much prettier, and the ability to search across all the lists is
nice but of course this is the IETF so I have some questions.

When reading through messages in a thread, there's no easy way I can
see to go to the previous or next message other than to click up and
down on the list of messages.  That's OK but you can't tell what
you've already read (the old version provided this sort of by accident
in browsers that change the color on links you've visited), and if
you want to go back past the current date range, you have to change
the range which loses your place.  It might be worth putting some
buttons on the message pane for common navigation like forward,
back, and top of thread.

Also, in the Filter by time list at the left, it's really hard to see
which time filter is selected, probably because I'm somewhat
colorblind.  It'd help if the highlight added bold or italic or
something else that doesn't depend on color.

But the most concerning is indexing, or lack thereof.  When I search
for strings of message text in the archive, I find messages in the old
archive but not the new one.  Is that deliberate?  Looking at the new
design with javascript and frames, it seems likely that web spiders
can't find the links to the messages.  There's various ways to fix
that but the easiest is probably to recognize the user agent strings
of the handful of spiders that matter (Google, Bing, Alexa for
archive.org, maybe a few others) and serve them a simplifed unframed
version of the site with links to the article pages.

R's,
John

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From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 14:36:42 -0500

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 07:14:03PM -0000, John Levine wrote:

There's an export to mbox/maildir option!  Yes!  (I used to keep a
script to stream-edit the almost-mbox mailman archives into mbox
format.  It seems I've lost it.)

> in browsers that change the color on links you've visited), [...]

The old-style mailman archive, the one with a link for each month (or
quarter), with by-thread and by-date views, is hard to beat.  Granted,
having a different archive by month (or quarter) was a bit of a PITA,
but not too bad.  Still, an mbox/maildir export feature... that makes up
for the UI faults (which hopefully will get fixed in due time).

Hmm, [spam] HTML e-mail gets rendered...  Is that a problem?  Probably.

> But the most concerning is indexing, or lack thereof.  [...]

+1

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 08:18:20 +1200

> having a different archive by month (or quarter) was a bit of a PITA,

Not when looking for a particular thread of messages in early 2000,
as I was the other day. I couldn't find any way with the new one of
finding a date range many years ago (maybe I'm just stupid). It's a
bit fiddly with the old archive, but can be done.

Long live both archives.

    Brian

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From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 15:29:32 -0500

> bit fiddly with the old archive, but can be done.

Why can't we have the old-style archives anyways?  I don't mind the new
thing, but like you I also want the old thing.

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 08:43:45 +1200

> thing, but like you I also want the old thing.

It's still there:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/maillist.html

Believe me, you'd have heard me shout from here if it had gone away.

   Brian

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From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 16:11:23 -0500

> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/maillist.html

That's not the one I like :(

I mean this:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/

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From: Brian E Carpenter <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2015 10:14:44 +1200

> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/

Agreed, that's better when you can get it.

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From: Nico Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2015 17:30:44 -0500

> Agreed, that's better when you can get it.

But... why can't we?